Could You Outrun the Toxic Red Flood?

It is about a week before early voting begins for a bunch of us around the country, and that means this may be one of the last times I have to convince you that, frustrated progressive or not, you better get your butt to a ballot box or a mail-in envelope this November, because it really does matter. Now I could give you a bunch of "what ifs" to make my point, or I could remind you how we spent all summer watching oil gush into the Gulf, and how that came to be. But, instead, it's "Even More Current Event Day", and we're going to visit Hungary for a extremely real-world reminder of what can go wrong when the environmental cops are considered just too much of a burden by the environmental robbers. If today's story doesn't scare you to death, I don't know what will. It ain't Texas, but we will surely visit a Red River Valley and you surely won't like what you're gonna see.

So here's the long and the short of it: Monday afternoon a sludge pond failed near the town of Devecser, Hungary. That failure has so far released about 265,000,000 gallons of extremely toxic sludge from a facility that mines bauxite as part of the process of making aluminum. That release manifested itself as a full-scale flash flood, which (courtesy of the RT network) looks something like this:

The red lake and the red mud that you see flowing like a river in the video has killed four people so far, injured hundreds, inundated four towns, and is on its way to the Danube River if it can't be stopped, where it will become part of the water supply for millions of Europeans. It turns out that bauxite ore contains alumina, which eventually become aluminum, but to get that alumina you apparently need huge quantities of caustic soda, in water, to make the extraction process work. The problem is that you extract more than just alumina: the same ore can contain lead, or cadmium, or any number of other heavy metals, including radioactive materials. The waste materials are discharged as sludge into holding ponds at the mine for further treatment, and the failure of one of those ponds is how we came to today's story. According to the BBC, emergency workers are pouring tons of plaster into the Marcal River in an effort to stop the flow of the liquid, and Hungarian Government experts believe the top inch of topsoil will have to be removed from the entire land area affected by the flood. So what's all this have to do with the upcoming American elections? Well, I'm glad you asked. This is not a problem somehow unique to Hungary...nor Brazil, nor Jamaica, either. We have sludge ponds of our own, many associated with coal mining, and in fact, one of those failed in Kentucky in 2000, in a massive way, and by 2004, things hadn't improved much at all in terms of cleaning up the mess. Others are associated with the other end of that process: coal-fired power plants have coal ash containments of their own, and they also fail. A pond failure in Tennessee in 2008 probably released over a billion gallons of waste into the local rivers. And if our Republican friends have their way, this will continue. Even as we speak, the EPA is considering regulating coal ash as a hazardous waste for the very first time--and if Republicans gain control of Congress, wanna guess how the considerating will come out? Look, folks, I know we're all frustrated that we aren't where we want to be with this Administration, but you gotta know that if you don't show up for this election, we are going to be dealing with Republicans who are far nuttier than what we have right now--and while I know that it was a fantastic change of pace to be able to vote for someone in '08, the plain fact is that most of the time, you're voting against something, and this time, that something is the insanity of the Tea Party. These Republicans are some very determined buggers, to quote that French sailor, and we have to be just as determined to stop these folks--and to do it where it counts, in places like Kentucky and West Virginia and Delaware--because if we don't, it means another generation of people in coal towns living with water they can't drink and cancer they can't cure, more rivers and wetlands and aquifers destroyed all over this country...and, eventually, it means all of this contamination, one way or another, will find its way to you and your family. Voting matters.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: In the few days since this was written, the spill has reached the Danube.

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What is so ironic is that the Repugs complain about the Democrats driving up the federal deficits so that (paraphrase) "the nation's debts will have to be paid for by our children and grandchildren" ... but they refuse to admit that they have been polluting the environment for decades, and making billions by selling energy at a fraction of its true cost of damage to the environment around us --- so that their/our children and grandchildren someday will have to pay the price of cleaning up all the damage done by their 20th and 21st Century ancestors --- meaning us! So the GOP and Big Oil is doing to the natural environment exactly what they accuse the Dem's of doing to the fiscal environment: robbing from future generations.

The World War II generation, my parents' generation, has been called by Tom Brokaw as "The Greatest Generation" ... and indeed, they were great, defeating Hitler and working to make the US a major industrial power ...

... but every generation has its faults, its weaknesses, and gets "spoiled" in some way. George W. Bush admitted that "America is addicted to oil" but no one (to my knowledge) has pointed out that the WW-II generation was the ultimate wave of cheap-energy junkies. To this day my Mom remarks, "I can't believe these gasoline prices, I can remember when gasoline was only 12 cents a gallon!" ... and in the depths of the January winter, she still wants to crank up the thermostat instead of putting on a sweater, and she thinks in terms of heating an empty six-room house instead of buying an electric blanket.

If the incident in Hungary weren't such a dreadful environmental disaster, I would make some silly joke about the red sludge hitting the blue Danube must make the water run purple. But it will be human flesh that turns purple, I fear, as the carcinogens have their deadly effect on the people of southeastern Europe.